Adrián del Valle Costa

Adrián del Valle Costa (1872-1945), a.k.a. Palmiro de Lidia, Fructidor, and Hindus Fakir, was, in the words of Kirwin Shaffer, “at the forefront” of Cuba’s anarchist literary world. Notable for having created “[p]erhaps the strongest female character in Cuban anarchist literature,” the eponymous heroine of his novela La Mulata Soledad (1929), the expatriate Catalan del Valle had a hand in editing or writing what would seem at first sight to have been half the Spanish-language anarchist publications on this side of the Monroe Doctrine: New York’s El Despertar, El Rebelde, and Cultura Obrera, Tampa’s Revista Cubana, El Esclavo and Verdad y Tierra, and in Havana, Cuba, the journals Nuevo Ideal, Pro-Vida, ¡Tierra!, Tiempos Nuevos, Cuba y América, La Reforma Social, La Nación…

The man seems never to have been at a loss for words.

Rather than dwell on his long list of accomplishments, though I’d like to present one of his short stories with only a slight introduction. The story, “El Músico Polaco [The Polish Musician],” is the first in his 1903 collection, Cuentos Inverosímiles [Implausible Stories]. It features — I don’t think this can be considered a spoiler, as it appears on the first page — a talking cello. Implausible enough for you? It is not, however, a story about a talking cello. Instead, it is about a musician who faces death by starvation in a world where music has no value, where it “matters little,” as he puts it. What is truly implausible, grotesque, is not (only) that an object should take on life — a life to which, as the musician argues, “a mere instrument, an object without a soul” should have no claim — but that a thinking, feeling, creative subject should be reduced to the status of a mute and meaningless object.

This motif of transfer and displacement, of the subject and object switching places, recurs again and again in anarchist culture. Understandably so: it is the theme of life under capitalism.

Here is my attempt at a translation of “El Músico Polaco.” Warning: some fiction makes you feel strong; some fiction carries strong feeling that can overwhelm. Do not read this if you are already sad. (In that case I’d recommend instead something like Félix Martí-Ibáñez’s “Threshold of the Door.”)

THE POLISH MUSICIAN

Sitting in a chair before his beloved cello, William Koseck, the old Polish musician, thought sadly of his miserable fate.

A muffled voice distracted him from his meditations:

“What are you thinking of, William Koseck?”

He raised his head, startled, looking around. There was nobody in the room, weakly lit by the dim light of a winter evening.

“I’m the one talking to you,” repeated the voice, which seemed to come from inside the cello.

“You? It’s you?…”

“Surprised you, didn’t I?”

Koseck shook his head sadly and replied:

“Nothing can surprise me.”

“You have suffered a lot of disappointment.”

“You know it well, my friend.”

“You dreamed of winning glory.”

“And you see, I only found poverty and disregard.”

“It was your own fault.”

“Don’t be cruel.”

“You lack the will, the courage, the burning desire to succeed.”

“Say rather that I lacked genius.”

The cello laughed, loudly vibrating its strings.

“How naive you are, Koseck,” it finally replied. “Often genius is merely a bit of art or science, a bit of originality and daring, and a lot of luck. Some men are geniuses and others are heroes due to a set of happy circumstances. You’d have to be a genius, but your modesty, your shyness, always made you blend in with the common heap, that anonymous heap which, with its admirable works, only serves to set off and give fame to the daring, preeminent personality: that of the genius.”

Koseck, flattered in his vanity – to be modest is somewhat vain – cast a look of gratitude on the cello.

“Actually,” he said “I am not without my qualifications. In my heyday, for many years, I was regarded as one of the best performers among the professors of the Grand Opera House. I understand that I was not the equal of distinguished cello virtuosos like Romberg and Servnis, but I never failed to play with feeling the musical wonders created for you, O divine cello, by Mozart, Beethoven, Boccherini. I do not know if it is because passion has blinded me, but I have always believed that you are the king of instruments. Gentle and melancholy at some times, energetic and witty at others, always sonorous and majestic, in the hands of an expert, you know how to move, with your plays of harmony, how to lift the soul to the purest regions …”

“Ah,” groaned the cello, “What good are such great wonders to me, if I cannot enjoy them?”

“And why the hell do you want to enjoy them?” Koseck objected. “You are a mere instrument, an object without a soul …”

“Ingrate! … After what I have contributed to your livelihood, you treat me with contempt. How do you know that I don’t have a soul of my own, that I cannot feel, after my own fashion?”

“Don’t be conceited, don’t ascribe to yourself qualities that you don’t have. Only living beings have sensations.”

“Everything that exists has sensation, to varying degrees.”

“But look here, you villain, how can you feel things if you have no life?”

“Well, old fool, what is life? Can you tell me what life is?”

Koseck opened his mouth to reply, but kept it open.

“You see?” continued the cello. “Despite your pride in being a feeling, thinking, living animal, you do not know what life is. Go, ask the wisest of your fellow men the reason for life; cut all four of my strings and pull out my pin if, with all his science, he can give you a satisfactory answer. In your seventy years of futile existence, useless efforts, cruel disappointments, hunger, and want, you should at least have learned that you have lived without knowing why.”

“I lived for art,” cried Koseck.

“Art! Art,” repeated the cello mockingly. “Don’t be silly, viejo mío. Art is a fiction, like life.”

“Don’t blaspheme. Art is the most sublime creation of human beings.”

“Bah! Empty words. Can you define art? Can you give it a clear, accurate, true explanation? No. Art varies according to seasons, climates, customs, temperaments. The emotion that art provokes can be reduced to sensations, varying according to the individual. Art itself is nothing but a sensation for the person who produces it and for the one who enjoys it. And you see fit to classify and define sensations, which are infinite, variable, and contradictory!”

“Your words make me despair. And tell me, if art is a fiction, what is glory?”

“Vanity, nothing more than vanity. Longing for glory, for admiration and flattery, for honors, for considerations and even for the riches they bring. Can you bring yourself to enjoy glory in the darkness, forgotten, poor and hungry? As to posthumous glory … go offer that bone to another dog. Nobody works to be celebrated after death.”

“Ah,” exclaimed Koseck. “Poor me, who have spent my life dreaming of art, longing for glory, to learn at the end of my journey, old, poor and forgotten, that life, art and glory are nothing more than wishful fictions! …”

“You have learned it late, but you may console yourself by thinking that others never learn.”

“You have stolen my dearest hopes.”

“Rejoice in it. At your age, all you have left to hope for is death.”

Koseck raised his fist and struck a tremendous blow to the charlatan instrument.

“Ah, damn you, you’re making fun of me…” he screamed angrily.

The cello fell down, jangling its strings disharmonically as a great cry of pain and protest.

Koseck awoke with a jerk.

* * *

The room was shrouded in darkness. The old musician was very cold in body and even colder in his soul. Recalled for a moment the strange dream and enlarged to infinity felt her sadness and loneliness. No hopes, no dreams, only the distressing reality of homelessness, poverty, old age, helpless and lonely.

He had not had a bite to eat in two days, and his stomach was imperatively demanding its rights. To eat, to eat anything, was now the only concern of the hungry man; but he had no money nor any valuable object to bring to the pawn shop, the great devourer of the poor, which only serves to prolong the torments of poverty.

The almost imperceptible notes of the fallen cello still rang in his ears. He thought they would be his immediate salvation. Why not hock it? He would have a few days more to spend; later … there would always be time to starve to death.

There, fallen before him, was the cello. Koseck picked it up and hugged it lovingly in his arms. He understood that deep emotion that invaded him. Would it worth it, if he had to lose that instrument, reassurance in his sorrows, faithful interpreter of his feelings, which reminded him of his long life as an artist, his hopes, his past successes and enthusiasms? No, it was not possible to abandon his beloved cello, repaying its service with the blackest ingratitude, simply to satisfy the material demands of the stomach, to extend his miserable existence a few days. He could not let strange hands desecrate this instrument that had been almost the only love of his life. He had rather die with it, recalling the triumphs of the past to forget the bitterness of the present.

His emotion grew, and in a transport of infinite tenderness, the old musician embraced the old instrument, sobbing, crying out:

“Oh, my cello! …”

For a long time was hugging him, moistening with tears, kissing him lovingly, caressing the slender fingers that plucked from the string sad notes and cries of suffering, tender and loving sighs, comforting it with a mother’s caresses, soft, incoherent notes; endless, indefinite vibrations …

Then he rose, lifted his grizzled head and took the bow, began to play, with a firm hand, Chopin’s funeral march. What accents of infinite sadness tore the docile instrument! What effects of supernatural harmony! What expressions of melancholy, of eternal farewell! Never in his life had he played with so much feeling, with such sincere inspiration. He was transported to ethereal regions, far from the earth, far from men, he believed himself a being purified by pain, rising to unfathomable heights in search of eternal peace, the ideal of tired spirits … When the last vibration of the last note was extinguished, Koseck, having returned to reality, wept silently, his tears falling on the silent cello.

* * *

It was snowing. Koseck painstakingly walked through the deserted, whitened streets, his cello on his back, feet sinking into the snow, feeling his face ravaged by the innumerable flakes that fell without interruption.

As they passed a modest restaurant, he stopped, hesitated a moment and finally went in. Nobody was eating, so he could not accomplish his intention, but he wanted to try his luck with the owner.

“Sir,” he said, “I have been without food since yesterday, and if you would kindly give me something to eat, I would play a beautiful sonata to repay you.”

“Good old man,” he replied, “if you want to eat, pay in more solid cash; music is money that blows away in the wind.”

Koseck left, thinking wistfully that art matters little before the materiality of life. He walked on, impervious to the weather, which was not as harsh as the vagaries of fate that afflicted his soul.

Wishing to try his luck again, he entered a tavern. There were few people. At the counter, two men fought with the bartender; in the background, several parishioners were playing cards; alone at a table, a drunk incoherently addressed the glass of brandy that he held in trembling hands.

The musician set down his cello and sat in a chair. For the first time in his life, he was going to play in a public institution to ask humbly for alms. Embarrassment burned his wrinkled face and beads of cold sweat ran down his body. But he did not hesitate: he set up his instrument, and with a hand that was awkward at first, then firm, he played some passages from Beethoven with exquisite feeling. The men continued arguing at the counter; the customers at the table went on playing; only the drunk paid attention, ceasing to talk and trying to follow the music with his head.

Finishing, Koseck took off his hat and went timidly to ask with that gesture, because his mouth was unable to utter a word. Nobody paid any attention; he was about to leave without having dared to ask the drunk, when the man called to him: “Hey you, musician, come here … take this, drink to my health,” and handed him a glass of brandy.

Koseck took it, emptying it in one gulp, and rushed out.

Once outside, he breathed hard. Having had a hard time, he was unwilling to repeat it. He felt more cheerful and even a little happy, probably because of the liquor he had drunk, but his stomach still stubbornly rebelled and reminded him irritably that it had been more than forty-eight hours since he had eaten.

Where to go? He did not know for sure, but his feet unconsciously seemed headed for a place to which his poverty had introduced him. After walking a long distance through the narrow streets of the city, he stopped at the doorway of a miserable-looking house. In the bottom window, which conveys the light inside, he read, in big characters: Pawn Shop. Koseck, standing at the door with tears in his eyes, gazed at his cello, the inseparable companion of his life as an artist; he clasped it in his arms, kissed it and went into the house that deserves to die in the gloomy chapel.

* * *

Koseck dozed, leaning his head on the small table, on which leftover bread and cheese could be seen. When he awoke, it was dawn. Through the window, covered in frost, penetrated a diffused light that filled the room with inconclusive shadows. He looked around for something. And the cello? he thought. Suddenly, like a thunderbolt, the reality flashed upon his brain. The cello, his life-long companion, the only thing that might alleviate his pains and soothe his misery, was not there, and never would be again, ever. Never, never! … He thought he would die from the anguish. He got up, feeling a lump in his throat and a great weight on his chest. His suffering was so intense that he tried to calm himself by walking with long strides across the room, clutching his chest with both hands.

He went and opened the window. It was still snowing. The deserted street, the quiet houses, the bare trees, the gray sky, all that cold, wet atmosphere gave off such a feeling of melancholy and solitude that Koseck, instead of relief, had the gnawing sense that the pain of life was too sharp for him and could be relieved only by death.

He abruptly left the window, reached into a drawer for a cello string, climbed atop the table, tied one end of the string to a ceiling beam, made a noose on the other end, placed his head through the noose, and, jumping from the table, rushed into eternity.

The string, receiving the strong jolt, gave off a moaning note, barely discernible, and William Koseck’s body rocked gently, face set in a horrible grimace.

Outside, snow was falling, covering everything with white melancholy, that vast shroud of dead nature.

Nafe is one of those authors who largely slips the traces of the scholarly establishment, leaving only slender threads of bio-bibliography to follow. She was indeed a contributor to Mother Earth, an associate of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, of Margaret Sanger and John Reed. In The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools, Upton Sinclair explains how, during the 1914 coal miners’ strike that touched off the Colorado Coalfield War (“a strange dead nightmare of grief and horror,” as Nafe described it to readers of Mother Earth, with miners gunned down by hired thugs and National Guard troops), Nafe and her friend Ellen Kennan spoke out to their students about what was happening and were subsequently drummed out by the school board, after four years of legal persecution, for refusing to sign a loyalty oath.

Was Nafe an anarchist? She became an organizer for Reed’s Communist Labor Party in 1919, renamed the United Communist Party in 1920.  While this doesn’t in itself rule out the possibility of anarchist identification in the decade prior, the fact remains that Mother Earth did publish the work of allies and sympathizers who were not themselves anarchists.  However, Nafe’s contributions are well within the anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist ethos of the journal.  “The Law and the Man Who Laughed” (Mother Earth, vol. 8, no. 4, June 1913, pp. 123-124), for instance, is a sardonic send-up of the idea that human beings are unable to regulate themselves without “a large supply of laws on every subject” — so that when the “the law which regulates the number of times a minute the people should breathe” expires, so do the people.

More powerful, however, is Nafe’s “The Woman Who Stood in the Market Place,” with its anguished, almost prophetic tone.  Read for yourself.

THE WOMAN WHO STOOD IN THE MARKET-PLACE

By Gertrude Nafe

A WOMAN came and stood in the market-place and offered therein the work of her hands. And the market-place was filled with those who were very tired, because there was no room and no work for them, and they struggled to push her away again, saying, “There is no room here. Go away! There is not even room for us who were here before. Go to your home.”

And she was afraid when she saw their grim and gaunt faces and the eyes of them red with anger, and she shrank back, pleading with them, “Look and see the place where my home was, for the market-place has covered it, and in all the world I have no spot for my feet save here in the market-place.”

But they would not listen nor pause for her saying, and they stoned her with But they would not listen nor pause for her saying, and they stoned her with stones so that she would have fled save that in good truth she had nowhere to go but to another part of the market-place. Only their own [381] weakness and pain came upon them so that they fought no more, and their starved hands sadly dropped the stones, and their anger of its ancient futility grew futile again.

So they stood wearily in the market-place and none wanted them. And as she stood with the others who might not work, she watched the market-place. And there came by men bowed with many hours of toil, dulled in understanding, weak in body. And she said to them, “Let me help you. So I shall work and you shall have time to grow into your humanity.”

But they looked at her with frightened eyes, saying, “Go away from us. You would take our work and leave us standing, as you are, with empty hands in the marketplace.”

And there came by women, mothers of little children, tired and worn in the market-place. And the little children clinging to their skirts stumbled and fell on the rough stones, for they were too little for the streets of the market-place. But their mothers could not lift them in their arms or even show them the way across the stones, because of the heavy burdens they carried in their arms — the burdens that were to serve the marketplace. Then the woman spoke eagerly, “Let me carry your other burdens that you may take care of your children.” But the mothers could not hear her because of the pitiful wailing of the little children which always filled their ears.

And she saw other children (God knows how little they were!) and they carried heavy burdens for the market-place. And every right that childhood ever had, had been stolen from them that they might become the docile slaves of the market-place. Then the woman cried with a voice of agony, “Let me take upon myself the work of these children. For I eat the food that they earn, and they have not enough. I am a woman, and this is a disgrace too intolerable to bear. For I have looked upon the earth and there is no beast that lives upon the work of its starving young save here in this market-place.”

And the woman spoke again: “All the hope for the World That Is To Be is in the children.” And the children lifted dull eyes and showed their white faces [382] stamped with hunger, weakness and ignorance, and unnameable vices that come from hunger and weakness and ignorance. And the mockery in those faces which had never learned to smile said, “Here, then, is your hope for the World That Is To Be.”

And the woman cried with a very bitter cry, “Among all these weary people crushed beneath their loads, is there nothing I can do?”

Then there came to her certain women who said to her, “Come with us and you shall have no lack.” But she shrank from them, saying, “You sell your bodies. That I cannot do.” And they laughed, “Lift up your eyes. Who is there in this market-place that has not sold his body? — yes, and for good measure thrown in mind and soul if perchance he had either.” As they left her they laughed contemptuously.

Then the woman said, “Now I will go over this market-place and find out the happy ones and learn from them. For if so many are wretched here, surely a few must be very happy to keep the balance true.” So she searched carefully among all those who stood greatest in the market-place; but in their feverish, harassed, anxious eyes she found no happiness. And then one explained to her: “They indeed have not opportunity either to eat or sleep or breathe the air of heaven. But look upon their women. To them they give everything, and the women are the joy that is wrung from the anguish of the market-place.”

Then the woman saw a long car drawn by many horses and upon it were the women of those who had succeeded in the market-place. Under the wheels were ground the bodies of men and other women and little tiny children. And the woman said, “Surely these women cannot endure the wailing in their ears?”

“They have stuffed their ears carefully, so they can hear nothing, else they could not ride through the marketplace.”

“But to see the mangled bodies!”

“They keep their eyes always carefully closed, else they could not endure to ride through the market-place.”

“But are they happy with eyes and ears always closed?” [383]

“They keep themselves busy, in the way you see.”

Indeed, as they came nearer, the woman saw a curious sight. The women, loaded with numberless golden chains, performed a thousand little motions all in perfect time. As one raised her hand, all raised their hands; as she lowered her hand, all lowered their hands. They spoke in concert, using exactly the same words.

“Is it useful?” asked the woman, doubtfully; “or is it beautiful, like a dance?”

“Nay, it is neither,” said her guide, “but it must be done so. The rulers of the market-place are judged by the perfection in the drill of the women they own. If the chains ever gall, it is their pride not to own it. Most of them are well calloused under their chains by now.”

The woman looked sadly at the women with closed eyes and ears, chained and moving all together. “And these are the happy ones of the market-place?” she said.

“That is one of the words not in good use in the market-place,” said the other. “Instead of ‘happy’ we say ‘rich,’ instead of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ ‘legal’ and ‘illegal.’”

“But they do not mean the same thing,” she tried to object.

“It is much less embarassing in explaining the market-place to our children,” he returned.

Then a passion of love and anger shook the heart of the woman. “And in the name of those children I shall curse this market-place.”

Then all who heard her ran together affrighted and clung to her skirts and said, “Lo, it is not for a woman to curse. Love and not hate is a woman’s work.” And lovers and little children clung to her and said, “There are still sunrise and flowers in the world. Do not curse our world away.”

And she blessed them saying, “I shall not curse your world away, and I could not if I would. For wherever there are children and lovers and saints and sages, the world is made anew every morning. But I shall curse the market-place which is the death of the world. For when a wind blows from there children die, and lovers grow suddenly white and old, and must part, and the sages are choked and the saints crucified. But I call upon all who keep in their hearts any justice or truth or [384] love to curse with me the market-place that violates every one of them. And I call mothers who carry in their bodies the World That Is To Be, and, more than all, those who carry it in their souls and will be delivered of it, in agony, when the time is come. And the curses called down upon it in hate and despair shall shake it, but this curse pronounced by love which it has violated shall destroy the Market Place forever.”

Nafe, Gertrude. “The Woman Who Stood in the Market Place.” Mother Earth 8.12 (Feb. 1914): 380-384.

Félix Martí-Ibáñez, All the Wonders We Seek

The author bio inserted at the end of the short story collection, All the Wonders We Seek: Thirteen Tales of Surprise and Prodigy (1963), is coy:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Cartagena, Spain, Felix Marti-Ibanez received his Doctorate in Medicine from the Medical School of the University of Madrid. He then practiced psychiatry in Barcelona and lectured throughout Spain on psychology, medical history, art and literature. During this period, he also edited several medical and literary journals and wrote novels and many books on the history of medicine and psychology. In 1937 he was appointed General Director of Public Health and Social Services of Catalonia, and later, Secretary of Public Health and Social Service for Spain. Dr. Marti-Ibanez came to reside in the United States in 1939 and subsequently became an American citizen. He has participated in the International Congresses of History of Medicine, History of Science, Psychology, and Psychiatry, held in Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Nice and Zurich. He has also lectured extensively throughout the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Japan and the Philippines. Dr. Martí-Ibáñez undertook the publication of several medical journals in 1950 and founded the publishing house of MD Publications, Inc., and in 1957 he created and launched the Medical Newsmagazine MD, of which he is the Editor-in-Chief and publisher. In January, 1960, he launched MD of Canada and in 1962, MD en Español.

The Order of Carlos J. Finlay was presented to Dr. Martí-Ibáñez in 1955 in recognition of his educational work in the field of medicine. In 1956 the New York Medical College, Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals, appointed Dr. Martí-Ibáñez Professor and Chairman of the Department of the History of Medicine.

Medicohistorical papers by Dr. Felix Martí-Ibáñez have been published in journals throughout the world. He is also the author of the section on the history of Medicine in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Americana. Articles and short stories of his have appeared in Town and Country, Esquire, Gentry, Cosmopolitan, Art & Architecture, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he contributes a column to Latin American newspapers.

Dr. Marti-Ibanez is now completing a pentalogy on the history of medicine, of which four books have been published: Centaur (Essays on the History of Medical Ideas), Men, Molds, and History, A Prelude to Medical History, and Ariel (Essays on the Arts and the History and Philosophy of Medicine). The fifth volume, The Fabric of Medicine, is a work in progress. Among Dr. Martí-Ibáñez’ current books is The Crystal Arrow (Essays on Literature, Travel, Art, Love, and the History of Medicine). His literary works in progress are Waltz, a collection of short stories; A Sword From Toledo, a historical novel on the times of Vesalius; The Pagodas, a humorous novel; and Journey Around Myself, a narration of his journeys around the world.

What is left unmentioned, in this apparently exhaustive list of distinctions, is that at the time of his service to Catalonia and Spain, it was unclear whether these nations numbered one, two, or three: the Spanish Civil War was in full swing, and the anarchist CNT-FAI faction had agreed, in order to fight off the fascist forces of Generalissimo Franco, to enter into the Catalonian and Republican Spanish governments.  The young doctor Martí-Ibáñez was working as a representative of the anarchist faction, and in order to emigrate to the U.S., he had to flee for his life across the Pyrenees with the remnants of the anti-fascist forces.  He in fact was, and had long been known as, an anarchist.

It is unclear exactly what year Félix Martí-Ibáñez was actually born in Cartagena, Spain — different sources put it as early as 1903 and as late as 1915 — but the earlier dates are perhaps more credible.  Son of the writer and teacher Félix Martí Alpera, he also took the name of his mother, Josefina Ibáñez (and, thereby, of his illustrious literary uncle, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez).  His polymath abilities were evident early on: as a medical student at the University of Madrid, specializing in psychiatry, he wrote his dissertation on the psychology and physiology of Indian mysticism (1935) — all while making a reputation for himself through his contributions of articles on sexual issues to anarchist publications like Estudios, Tiempos Nuevos, and Ruta.  His take on sexuality and gender norms was refreshingly libertarian and egalitarian for the times, and while he exercised governmental authority, he made it a priority to provide working-class women with unrestricted access to abortion and family planning services — putting Catholic Catalonia well in advance of the rest of Europe.

In the middle of all this, the young doctor penned two novels: Yo, Rebelde: Novela Juvenil y de Inquietudes, published by the Biblioteca Estudios (1936), and Aventura: Poema de Juventudes (1938), published by the FIJL (Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias or Libertarian Youth Federation, the youth wing of the FAI).

The dedication to All the Wonders We Seek reads:

To William Somerset Maugham, greatest modern example of the physician as homme de lettres, whose friendship has been throughout the years an evergreen source of joy, inspiration, and enlightenment.

In his biography of Maugham, Ted Morgan writes:

During the South Ebro campaign he [Martí-Ibáñez] was hit in the arm and scalp by a dumdum bullet and took refuge in a bombed house in the village of Torre del Espanol. In the house he found a tattered volume of Maugham’s short stories, and marveled at the prose, which he found “taut and dry as Toledan leather, and endowed with that ‘difficult simplicity’ so dear to Cervantes.” Settling in New York, Martí-Ibáñez also wrote short stories, which he sent to Maugham for criticism. Of one of his stories Maugham wrote him: “Of course you are a scientist, a psychologist and a moralist. These are very good things, but the writer of fiction must take care that his special interests do not cause harm to his fiction. In effect your story is a piece of propaganda in condemnation of the atom bomb.”

Perhaps he took this advice a little too much to heart.  The fiction Martí-Ibáñez writes in exile — like his medical-historical essays — seems to meticulously avoid reference to anarchism. It is not hard to see, however, that his stories constitute a certain refusal to surrender the old libertarian dream. “In our hurried life,” the doctor writes, “[we] do not dream enough, and daydreams are important [...]” He admits to being “a romantic”: “To be a romantic means that a man lets his heart go to his head [...] [adopting] a quixotic attitude, a sort of magic lens that transfigures the world and its inhabitants so that they can be viewed in a different perspective.”

He sends fiction to Weird Tales and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as well as to Esquire.  The stories are florid, dreamy, filled with a kind of exuberance that is at the same time strangely melancholy.  A “recurring theme,” Evelyn C. Leeper notes, is “the desire to escape from ‘the commonplace and hopeless’”: in “The Star Hunt,” for example, a rather grouchy, punctilious pharmacist, Don Zoilo, “goes out one morning on an errand and finds himself drawn into a series of extraordinary adventures far beyond his normal banal existence.” Drawn into is perhaps soft-pedaling it; Don Zoilo experiences all of this as a kind of unexpected assault on his person, his character, his sense of what is right, “respectable,” rational, and real.  “I think I am going mad,” he protests to one of his magical abductors, a violet-eyed girl who frequents his shop but whom he has never noticed before; “You must be joking.”

“Joking?” The girl’s eyes froze into two amethysts. “There’s nothing funny about this. You have lived alone with your pills entirely too long. Your world is confined to your drugstore and your bottles. Your imagination stops at your prescriptions. You never even noticed the young girl who day in day out sat at her sewing machine looking out her window at a tiny fragment of street.  One can stand that sort of existence only so long and no more. One day something bursts in one’s heart like a spring, and one can bear it no longer. Either one escapes from the cage or one suffocates. [...]“

The “cage” seems to be something like what Freud called the “reality principle“(the tendency to avoid pain, as opposed to the “pleasure principle” that drives us to seek greater pleasure); indispensable as a means of self-preservation and adjustment to the contours of the natural and social worlds, pain-avoidance can overtake pleasure-seeking to such an extent that we hobble ourselves, curbing our imaginations, limiting our explorations to what social conventions have decreed to be safe.  No wonder that the process that takes Don Zoilo out of his tidy routine, which the others in the story experience as a great self-fulfillment and liberation, feels to him like disintegration, like a threat to his very being, a cracking-apart of the world. What would our world look like if the pleasure principle were given a wider field for expression?

In “The Threshold of the Door,” Martí-Ibáñez imagines such a world in the form of a parallel dimension (Leeper thinks of E. A. Abbott’s Flatland — not a bad comparison). A visitor from the parallel-dimensional Caracas teaches an inhabitant of the mundane Caracas to step sideways into his “poetic world” where the desires of each intersect with the desires of every other — a heady, magic-realist take on the utopian socialist Charles Fourier’s “new loving world,” one might say.  In Fourier’s utopia, nobody would ever “work” — i.e., do anything he or he didn’t want to — but productive activity would be constant, driven by “passional attraction.” Likewise, in Martí-Ibáñez’s “poetic world,” as the mysterious visitor explains, “[e]veryone’s desires complement everyone else’s”:

“In your world you are a wheel that spins around things. Here, everything spins around you.  Why do you think all these people have listened to you all day? Why have they willingly given you caviar and champagne instead of coffee and toast? Why did the conductor steer the streetcar into a street where there are no tracks? Why did the girl accept your love? Because in this world everything centers around you.”

“But what about the others?”

“Everyone here is lord and master of himself. If they followed you in your desires and whims, it was because these fitted in perfectly with their own desires and whims. In carrying out your fantastic dreams you were actually helping the others to carry out theirs. You are the center diamond in the crown, but so are the others. That is what is so marvelous about this world [...] The waiter who served your exotic breakfast had always dreamed of doing just that; the aviary attendant had dreamed many times of freeing his birds, and so on down the line.  In this world, unrealized desires, the lost I’s, the unlived lives, all are fulfilled [...]“

If this fantasy seems purely fantastic, it is only by way of literary flourish. The organizing principles of the “poetic world” are essentially the same as those postulated by the CNT-FAI: linked together by mutual aid, the egoistic pleasure-seeking of autonomous individuals becomes a social principle. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon borrows a similar metaphor from Pascal to describe the non-authoritarian structure of anarchy, comparing it to a sphere: “the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” If there is a gap between Proudhon’s rational description of anarchy (mutuality, free contract, federation . . .) and Martí-Ibáñez’s romantic description of it (absurd coincidences, parallel worlds, mysterious convergences of strangers . . .), the difference is largely in the distance between 1936 and 1963. The possible, having lost its chance to become real, returns disguised as the impossible.

This is how dreams live in exile.

Kristyn Dunnion (1969–), a vegan, queer anarchist from Canada, is the author of three novels for a wide age range of readers: Missing Matthew, Mosh Pit, and Big Big Sky. She’s also a performance artist under the name Miss Kitty Galore, plays bass for dyke metal band Heavy Filth, and has helped organize the Toronto Anarchist Bookfair.

Author’s website

www.kristyndunnion.com

Novels available online from Fitzhenry.ca

• Big Big Sky
• Mosh Pit
• Missing Matthew